[mjdesa]

I owned a pretty decent amount of crypto back in 2012, but sold all of it and own essentially none now. I think what you’re missing here is that there is actually potential in the space and that there are a decent amount of people trying to solve real problems that exist today.

The two big ones I can think of are payments and ownership.

Payments has always been a difficult part of the web. Multi billion dollar companies have been created around this difficulty. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a native, protocol level way to handle payment?

Similarly, digital ownership is totally fragmented. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a way that I could take my digital things with me between different services? I own a number of videos on Amazon, but why can’t I take that ownership right with me to view them on Hulu, or some other service.

[paulryanrogers]

> I own a number of videos on Amazon, but why can’t I take that ownership right with me to view them on Hulu, or some other service.

Do you? Terms probably state you bought a license. The incentive is for producers and platforms to silo content to maximize sales. Why would they agree to use a less centralized platform unless forced by law or coordinated market demand?

[hiq]

I've been commenting a few times about this already, but you're just arguing for interoperability, and blockchains don't help in that regard.

[kybernetikos]

I probably agree with a chunk of this, but there is a level at which blockchains, specifically smart contract platforms help enormously with interoperability - they force those using them to provide standard, transactionally interoperable APIs to their services. If someone provides a financial service on ethereum for example, then it will have an api that can be used by other services on ethereum. This is a shocking level of interoperability compared to what we had before, where even with government stepping in and making things like OpenBanking mandatory, it's still surprisingly painful for a normal developer to create services that interoperate with their own bank accounts.

[hiq]

> If someone provides a financial service on ethereum for example, then it will have an api that can be used by other services on ethereum.

Not necessarily. You can have a smart contract that's completely controlled by one address, such that you need manual interaction with an external system to interact with the smart contract. You can even avoid transparency by storing information elsewhere, via an oracle. Nothing ensures that somebody providing a financial service on Ethereum will provide anything that could be considered an API.

Other than that, for the same financial service, the same regulations will apply to both the Ethereum and traditional version. If it's legally possible to offer some kind of API on Ethereum and it does bring value, the same could be achieved outside of Ethereum. But IMHO the real reasons for the absence of such APIs are regulations and incentives, for which Ethereum doesn't help.

[kybernetikos]

> IMHO the real reasons for the absence of such APIs are regulations and incentives

Sure, but smart contracts have totally different incentives and costs for creating interoperable services than e.g. mobile apps. I would say that Ethereum does help here.

[hiq]

> Sure, but smart contracts have totally different incentives and costs for creating interoperable services than e.g. mobile apps. I would say that Ethereum does help here.

Why would you say that? For what reasons?

To engage with your comment a bit more, regarding costs, it's very expensive to:

* write secure smart contracts (if possible at all)

* maintain a smart contract infrastructure (transaction fees)

There's no solution in sight for either of these.

[kybernetikos]

It's very expensive to write secure smart contracts, true, but it's also surprisingly expensive to write secure systems using more traditional technologies too.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by it being expensive to maintain a smart contract infrastructure, because if your application suits it, you can literally deploy your smart contract and forget it, and people can use it into the future without you ever having to pay server costs - i.e. for the person deploying the smart contract it can be much cheaper. To the extent that it would be reasonable to hope people would deploy public infrastructure as smart contracts, even if they wouldn't want to deploy public infrastructure as cloud services. If you're worried about overall costs like transaction fees, it's not at all true that there's no solution in sight for them. There are minority cryptocurrencies now with no transaction fees, and even if you are skeptical about their promises, the largest smart contract ecosystem around (ethereum) has a plausible roadmap for dramatically reducing transaction fees. You can checkout the first few that are deployed here https://l2fees.info/ but significant improvements in this area are still expected over the next few years on ethereum.

The point about the incentives is that if you are asked to create a mobile app for a bank to manage mortgages, it is possible but extremely unlikely that you will put the effort in to make this accessible via API to the users or the rest of the ecosystem who might want to create tools that create visualisations, aggregate data for the user, certify that someone in the real world is prepared to lend them significant amounts of data, etc.

If on the other hand you create a blockchain solution to manage mortgages, it is extremely unlikely that you wouldn't create a reasonable externally accessible API - it's the default way of writing blockchain applications.

[mjdesa]

Why has interoperability failed in the past? Why don’t we have it today?

[oblio]

Because the money and the interest is not in interoperability. It's in chunking everything in small bits and selling every small bit repeatedly.

[hiq]

Why would we get it thanks to blockchains?

[mjdesa]

Because they’re open ledgers.

I think of blockchain like I do JavaScript / JSON.

Are the perfect? No. But there’s a lot of time and energy being put into them and sometimes that’s all you really need to get things going.

[hiq]

> Because they’re open ledgers.

As I explained in another comment in the same thread, it's a far cry from ensuring interoperability. The term "open ledger" is also misguiding since it's just an open ledger of whatever you want to put there, it doesn't necessarily reflect even a representative part of a whole system that would provide some kind of financial service.

As another commenter explained regarding video ownership, there's also no incentive to move any old and non-interoperable system there to begin with.

[badwolf]

Just a side note about your digital movies: You can connect your various accounts and share your library across services with Movies Anyhwhere: https://moviesanywhere.com